What's Complicated

As I go through my notes from bpmNEXT, I keep finding little gems that I want to share. Like the note I wrote myself- that Germans love David Hasselhoff… and BPMN, after watching a series of great presentations reflecting serious expertise in the arcana of modeling.

BPMN isn’t what’s complicated. Business is what’s complicated.

Okay, the nit-pickers out there can rightly point out that sometimes IT increases complexity (picture legacy system and migration issues as new technology landscape is implemented). But for the most part, BPMN wasn’t the barrier to solving business problems in this august gathering at bpmNEXT, it was a foundational (and largely background) element – just like all the other modeling techniques being used, including code.

The very real complexity of running large businesses is what drives the complexity of the models. For example, the folks who were addressing DODAF and semantic models- it wasn’t BPMN causing that complexity, it was the requirements of their particular “business” (the government). Of course, it is possible to have an overly complex model, so writing a concise model is where some of the craft of BPM comes in

Too often we blame the tools – or the messengers. Sometimes the solution is only as simple as it is.